Page:More Australian legendary tales.djvu/23

 These are interesting traits for the student of animism, as when Piggiebillah sleeps on his face that his doowee, or dream spirit, may not leave him as he slumbers. Wurrunnah is eager to know "where Byamee (Baiame) is," the Good Being who made and instructed mankind; who has withdrawn to heaven which is His home, leaving laws not to be broken. We see the black seeking after God, if perhaps he may find Him, dreaming the great dream of the universal Father, the friend of righteousness (as it is understood by the tribes), who receives His children into everlasting habitations. Byamee is at once the god and the culture hero in these myths. He made the "stone fisheries," which Mr. Gideon Scott Lang, many years ago, described to me as the only material evidence of a time of more organisation and enterprise among the blacks than now exist.

The "Legend of the Flowers" is the most important example of the Byamee creed in this volume. The flowers all followed Byamee, when he retired from earth and went to Bullimah, the land of rest. I cannot persuade myself that Byamee and Bullimah are echoes of Christian teaching. Waitz has rejected that idea, and I see no evidence that we "white devils" have largely influenced native belief. These stories reflect human hopes and the world's desire, things natural, untaught, inevitable. The All Seeing Spirit is here distinguished from Byamee; but in Mr. Howitt's accounts; Durumulun (another name for the same conception) can himself see and hear everything. Byamee has spirits who